Today is my last day as the "morning guy" at Lifehacker. I wrote approximately 5,883 posts in slightly less than three and a half years. Some, I hope, were notable. Some make me cringe. I've pulled out a few posts and lessons we all might enjoy on my last day. Oh, and one or two Nick Denton stories, too.

It's not a sad goodbye, as I'm stepping out on my own and going "full-time freelance," whatever that means. I'll save all the thank-yous and goodbyes and insights and blah-de-blah for my personal site—even with Adam P. on vacation, that's a bit "too insider-y." But I did want to do something a bit fun and reflective on my last day, and, hey, I've written a lot of lists since Gina Trapani took kindly to a shot-in-the-dark email.

So with apologies to Merlin Mann (a man to whom, I'm sure, many folks believe I owe many apologies), I present here Five Lists of Five Things I Learned at Lifehacker. After grabbing lunch, I'll hang around in the comments, too, and answer any (reasonable) questions or comments. Have at it!

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Five Tips I'm Taking with Me

Like a Mitch Albom book, but it doesn't cost you $12 or make you argue with your friends.

Ask for a "Spicy red" when asked for a wine pick: At a dinner of Gawker Media types in Manhattan, everybody turned to Adam Pash as the "guy from California" to pick out the wine. He asked the server to point out a "spicy red," and the table proceeded to put down 5-6 bottles of said red wine. As I (vaguely) recall, the wisdom is that it's just specific enough to narrow the choices and not seem completely uninformed, and, given a decent wine list, results in something that's not a bland "table wine." I use this way too often.

Fake it until you make it: Too many people, when tasked with writing something in a form they haven't written before, are afraid to artfully swipe the organization, style, and other facets of the things they themselves read and search out. Nobody's born with an instinct for writing five-step guides to running Windows seamlessly inside Ubuntu with VirtualBox. Just sayin'.

Quintuple-check any terminal commands you recommend: And run them on your own system, twice, and make sure you can still type after that.

Just do whatever Gina Trapani does: Quit your stable job to write for a blog none of your friends or colleagues have heard of. Write a book on spec about a new technology, just to prove you can. Quit that same blog to try new things. See also: Fake it until you make it.

Five Observations From Waking Up at 5:30 a.m. and Reading 1,000+ Google Reader Items and Writing Five or Six Posts Every Morning for Three-Plus Years

Sometimes 6 a.m., or even 6:30 a.m., but those were ... less than ideal mornings.

5:30 a.m. on the East coast is a magic time: It gives you two solid hours in which to work, mostly uninterrupted, before anybody you know who isn't in London (or Hungary) can possibly affect your day. Your email recipients think you're either a go-getter or, on the West coast, a super-crazy-go-getter. I don't believe anybody really gets "used to" working across time zones. Which is fine by me. Let them wonder whether you're an insomniac, or whether you really left work for drinks at (seemingly) 2 p.m. Photo by theogeo

The three worst days to be looking for new, interesting tech things: The day before, the day of, and the day after anything happens at all related to Apple. "What Will Be Announced in 12 Hours?" followed by "Why You Must/Should/Should Not Buy This Thing Just Announced," with a seemingly interminable tailwind of "What This Means for Apple and Microsoft and RIM and Anything Remotely Competing With This New Apple Thing." It's pretty frustrating to see stacked, one after the other, in a feed reader.

The way commenters perceive you is probably more interesting than reality: Based on a casual perusal of comments across three years, I harbor a deep-seated prejudice against Microsoft software, Apple products, and the free software community, simultaneously. I also intentionally encourage my cat to contaminate my guests' food, and I also deserve to have my cat taken away for considering alternative litter management ideas.

The best interviews are when the subject pings you ahead of time: When someone's serious about giving their time and thoughts to answering your questions, they don't just give you their number, they ask for yours. Witness my three favorite interviews: Adam Savage of Mythbusters, "Nerdist" Chris Hardwick, and actor Rob Corddry (who actually emailed, but far ahead of deadline).

Google Reader's lack of a "Mark Previous as Read" function is ridiculous: Yes, you can set up all your feeds in neat little folders, and read each of those individually and "Mark All as Read." You can hold down the "K" key and watch your browser painfully grind through quick-opening hundreds of previous items (or install a script that automates that press-and-hold). But when your job requires monitoring all your news feeds rather quickly, this is a huge pain in the butt. There are desktop feed readers that sync to Reader that offer semi-convenient solutions, and even the Android app has this hugely useful feature built in. But why, oh why, can't we have this feature in the standard, generally likable Google Reader webapp?

The Geek's Guide to Rebooting Your Kitchen: I took quite a few stabs at writing about food and cooking under the banner of productivity and efficiency, with mixed results. But this post was fun, had a few good pointers, and let me pretend like I was writing off part of my kitchen remodel.

5 Cringe-y Posts I Can't Erase

Literally, too, because we don't take down posts at Lifehacker.

Design Your Own Desktop with KDE 4: My enthusiasm for anything Linux at the time overtook my more general sensibilities of "How long does it take to figure out how to connect to Wi-Fi?" and "How is this not one hot mess of a desktop?"

Install Ubuntu on a White MacBook(o): I left a title typo, "White MacBook(o)," on the front page for about an hour somehow. I have certain nerdy friends who will never let me forget this. It is kind of a catchy phrase, though: "Mac-book-Oh."

Make Vista Use Multiple Cores to Speed Boot Time: I have since learned to take any advice on speeding up systems with a skeptical eye and fist-sized granules of sodium chloride. But, come on—remember when Vista was still new? How reasonable did it seem the solution was a switch that someone forgot to turn on?

Top 10 Useful Bookmarklets: It's more a contender in the "Posts For Which Gina Will Never Forgive Me" category. Still, the memories of frantically trying to keep 10 separate JavaScript executions from destroying our semi-new publishing platform are deeply embedded.

Five Posts I Think Adam Pash Liked the Best

Gina was way too nice. Making Adam use an exclamation point was much more fun.

Top 10 Tricks MacGyver Would Be Proud Of: Actually, I'm pretty sure this is one of Adam's all-time favorites, mostly because I wrote 10 tiny bits of fan fiction framed around clever tips. Take note, young'ns—you're one A-Team-themed how-to feature away from adulation.

Bonus: Two Nick Denton Stories

It's kind of tradition, now, as the Gawker Media publisher once asked his writers to "burn their bridges" upon leaving, but most of us realized his was the only bridge we had left.

One morning late last year, Nick sent me a direct message via Twitter: "Context?" That was the entirety of the message—no link, no specifics, just "Context?" This was at about 9:30 a.m. EST, after 4 posts had gone up that morning. When I tried to DM him back, he'd already stopped following me. So I rewrote all my headlines for a more general audience, clarified every point in each post that might possibly assume too much, and added more explanatory links to everything. Which, if I had to guess, was exactly the point. Match, set, point, Mr. Denton.

I took the train to Manhattan one holiday weekday, primarily to have lunch with Gina. The train arrived 2.5 hours late, and I was due back for in-law obligations that night. As I was leaving Gawker's Nolita office in the early evening, I went to say goodbye to Nick. "‘Ave ta shuffle off to Buffalo so quick, eh?" That's right—his top-of-the-head association with Buffalo, NY doesn't relate to chicken wings or non-champion sports teams, but a 1933 Busby Berkeley musical number. It's easy to forget he's British.

In all seriousness, I owe Nick, Gina, Adam P., and everyone who's put up with me many, many thanks for three life-changing years. I'll be contributing here on occasion, and looking forward to seeing how Lifehacker grows—maybe with a bit more sleep.